425001

tabJournal of Planning Education and Research

JPEXXX10.1177/0739456X11425001Miraf

Symposium

Symposium IntroductionImmigration
and Transnationalities of Planning

Journal of Planning Education and Research

31(4) 375378
The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0739456X11425001
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Faranak Miraftab1
This symposium of JPER on immigration and transnationalities of planning is about movementof people, resources,
and policies. It brings together scholars across their disciplinary homes in Sociology (Simone), Geography (Parnreiter), and Planning (Roy and Miraftab) to prompt a much
needed conversation.
We live in an era marked by unprecedented movement
and crisscrossing of capital, labor, and ideas. The conventional urban development literature that theorizes or formulates policy based on a territorially bound understanding of
development and constituency-building processes can neither explain, nor help us change, the evolving trends we
observe today in city forms, or in urban and regional booms
and busts. Immigrants earnings in one part of the world lead
to the development of housing and infrastructure in another
distant nation (Miraftab 2011). Politicians and electoral campaigners launch their constituency-building efforts among
expatriates and in political communities located outside their
national jurisdiction. Mayors and policy makers striving for
solutions to local development problems of their constituent
communities window shop for fast policies and off the
shelf plans at global policy fairs (Parnreiter 2011; Roy
2011). In short, we are facing a rearticulation of state, citizen, and market relationships that deterritorialize and reterritorialize the meaning of citizenship and belonging to a
national political community. Today it is not only the immigrant workers that lead the way with their feet by emigrating to implement their own economic plan (Simone 2011
p. 388) but it is also the economic development officer in the
remote municipality of the Jalisco highlands, who serves the
district by traveling to Concord, California, to determine
with fellow Jaliscan immigrants the pubic works mandate of
his municipal jurisdiction (personal field notes 2008). Here
in this Jaliscan municipality, immigrant residents of Concord
have a greater say than citizen inhabitants within its territorial bounds a condition that needs to be considered as part
of the new geographies of planning decision making.
The contemporary fluidity of populations, families,
resources, and even policies and ideas across national borders is a ground-shifting transformation with important
implications for planninga field that has conventionally
been about stabilizing populations and places (Simone
2011). The ideas of planning and planners, as Parnreiter in
the opening of his contribution articulates, have traveled
across borders for a long time (p. 416), imported,

exchanged, exported and imposed. Planning, as a profession

with a colonial genesis, has often feasted on the very
inequalities and development problems it has produced
through its plans and models for progress. As we move
deeper into the twenty-first century, however, we encounter
a historical moment marked by both its transnational hypermobility and its protectionist xenophobia, or what Roy calls
hysterical nativism. At this particular moment in the historical transnationality of planning, it is important for planning educators, scholars, and practitioners to engage
critically with plannings current transnationality and the
cross-border and cross-continental movements of people,
resources, policies, and plans.
A decade ago, JPER dedicated a special issue to the relationship between globalization and planning (Afshar and
Pezzoli 2001). This was one of the activities of the then
recently created Global Planning Educators Interest Group
(GPEIG) within the Association of Collegiate Schools of
Planning (ACSP). The important conversations that the journal and the interest group have created over time among planning educators need to be revisited today. A global planning
perspective rightfully critiques the older international development planning paradigm that separates the here and the
there or the domestic and the international, and urges
reflective engagement with globalization processes. But it
also needs to adequately develop or allude to the ethical principles through which such engagement could or should be
pursued and clarify the conceptual vehicles we use in that
regard. Revisiting these questions is particularly critical
today, when global planning itself is often accused of participating in the creation of a form of globalism in the sense
Marcuse (2004) or Steger (2002) define as a new legitimization of global capitalism that obscures the power dynamics,
tensions, and unequal relationships constituting the global.
Moreover, the interchangeable use of the terms international,
global, and more recently transnational have created murky
grounds that make it more difficult to distinguish the critique
from its subject and to recognize the important implications
1

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:
Faranak Miraftab, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University
of Illinois, 611 Lorado Taft Drive, 111 Temple Buell Hall, UrbanaChampaign, IL 61820, USA
Email: faranak@illinois.edu

376
each conceptual framework might have for a methodology
and praxis of planning. I therefore take the opportunity in this
introduction to make an attempt to clarify.

Globalization and Planning

Within the field of planning, two perspectives tend to dominate the explanations of and engagement with globalization.
An international framework rooted in political science
disciplinary traditions explains globalization as accelerated
exchanges and relationships among sovereign national entities. Its unit of analysis being the nation-state, this perspective
concerns inter-governmental or inter-national governments
relationships. International planning shaped with this perspective assumes that planning professionals and agencies
exchange programs, plans, and ideas outside the structures
of powerthe sphere of willing buyer and willing seller.
This framing of globalization dismisses global structural
inequalities. Moreover, it atomizes the global challenges
at the national level as well as concealing the multidirectionality of development processes. Ultimately, this reinforces
an old colonial mentality among planners and practitioners in
the global north about the development burden of the
white man.
A global framework that emerged in response to the misconceptions outlined above rightfully tried to see the forest
beyond the individual trees. But in moving the unit of analysis beyond the nation-state it has swung to the other end
of the analytical spectrum, to a monolithic world in which
national territories are irrelevant. The idea of a postnational world as Roy discusses creates a phantom global
that assumes a transcendence of structural difference and
unmaking of borders and boundaries (Roy 2011, p. 407).
This conceptualization that celebrates globalization as the
victory of one unitary world (global capitalism) as reflected
in the writings of Fukuyama, Thomas Friedman, and early
Jeffrey Sachs underlies much of the work that institutions
like the World Bank, World Trade Organization, and
International Monetary Fund undertake and the policy advice
driving the bulk of strategic plans they promote (see
Parnreiter 2011). Independent of the scholarly debates that
have long moved away from such views of globalization, in
the world of practice by multilateral organization the globalization framework has translated to a unifying tendency, a
sort of universalism that yet again obscures structures of
power and global inequalities. This narrative depicts globalization as a placeless and irresistible flow that often moves
unidirectionally from the center or the West to the rest and
feeds off a binary construct that suggests the North produces globalizations and the South experiences it (Miraftab
2011, p. 394). In a universal narrative of globalization with a
unitary object of analysis, problems and solutions are globally convergent, and planning enjoys its subject matter with
a singular prefix: the global. Global planning then becomes

Journal of Planning Education and Research 31(4)

understood as a unifying practice, whereby consultants via
short trips and quick-fix policies can make use of homemade
universal blueprints, requiring only minor adjustments for
implementation anywhere in the world.
Each of these frameworks, the global as a singular, universal, and placeless or the international as the sum of multiple sovereign yet closely interacting territorialized national
entities, involves convenient absences, silences, and a silencing that Ferguson (2006) articulates in Global Shadows. He
uses a nodal concept to describe globalization as processes
that connect discrete points or locations, capital is globehopping, not globe-covering he writes (Ferguson 2006: 38).
In that vein, a transnational framing of global processes is
attentive to the points of disconnect, disjunctions, and friction (Tsing 2000) as well as the stoppages and decelerations
(Sassen 2000). To see both the trees and the forest, a transnational framework strives for a multiscalar and multidirectional analysis (Burrawoy et al. 2000; Guarnizo and Smith
1998). While anchored in specific locations, a transnational
analysis spans local, national, and global, and recognizes
multiple directions through which globalization is constituted. Such a framework allows us to see the complex and
multiple spatialities and temporalities of globalization
(Miraftab 2011). It accounts for the zigzags of processes that
shape global policies and human migration, and recognizes
the structures that selectively include and exclude nations in
the imagination of a global community.

Developing the Transnational Framework

Through a wide range of stories, contributions to the present
symposium expose two aspects of transnationalism shaping
contemporary urban and regional development policies and
plans: (1) the multiscalar structures and processes that shape
transnational urban and regional experiences and
(2) the multidirectionality of transnational processes. Grounded
in a broad spectrum of experience that includes traders, youth,
and residents in West and Central Africa, Togolese and
Mexican meatpackers in the heartland of the United States,
aliens along the U.S.Mexico border, and policy tourists in
European city-networks, these essays help us understand the
making of transnationalism from below, above, in between,
and sideways.
Using a transnational framing of the global processes,
symposium contributors pay special attention to the power
dynamics in the traveling and border-crossings of ideas,
policies, plans, and people. They bring to light those forces
and resources that motivate and sustain such movements.
Far from a postnational homogeneity, they demonstrate that
transnational fluidity of families, policies, and resources are
structured and bear on specific institutional practices and
policies that selectively erect and erase national borders.
People and policies travel not according to free will, nor in
free circuits, but through specific technologies of crossing

Miraftab
(Sandoval 2002, cited in Roy 2011) that engage particular
structures and practices. Moreover, their movements are
complex and cannot be simply captured by a pushpull factor analysis (Simone 2011) that inevitably leads to a unidirectional understanding of how people, resources, and ideas
move: namely, people, as cheap laborers, move from global
South to North; resources, as in remittances, move from
global North to South; and policies radiate from the center,
the West, to the rest of the world (Mahler 1998).
Contributors to this symposium engage with a series of
questions that are key to the understanding of immigration
and planning in a transnational era. What are the spaces
these movements shape and how do they offer a resource to
increasingly fluid relationships, places and people? Simone
tackles this through a detailed ethnographic description of
the dynamic frontiers of contemporary Africa and informal
trading spaces people create through informal cross-border
and cross-continental trade. In his earlier work (2004),
Simone helped us see people as effective infrastructure in
much of the urban world, but absent from planners understanding of how urban infrastructure works. Here he reminds
us of the relationship between movement and trade that has
long been a source of livelihood for Africans yet has made
little dent into the existing planning and governance frameworks. He argues that planning mechanisms tend to assume
certain stability in the relationship of population to place. . . .
Although stabilizing populations and economic practices
does have value, not enough attention is placed in urban
planning on making use of how movement continuously
respatializes social positions and resources (p. 379; 390).
He highlights the potential of a regional governance framework in border zones for urban articulation of fluid communities in ways that make already existent movement more
productive and convenient (p. 390). These spaces, Simone
argues, governed at a regional scale, produce an urbanity that
follows the resources and reflects the fluidity of cross-border
communities. They produce what he calls an urbanity of
movement.
What are the invisible structures and relationships that
make this movement of people and resources possible?
Miraftab addresses this by examining the revitalization of a
Midwestern meat-packing town in the United States and how
its local development is intimately connected to a series of
dispossessions and transnational reorganizations of familial
and community care that take place in Togo and Mexico
processes she calls the global restructuring of social reproduction. Her ethnographic studies make visible the
multidirectional flow of resources in immigrants transnational practices. While immigrants remittances serve as
social insurance for relatives back home (what she calls the
publics policy), families and home institutions of immigrant workers subsidize the low wages of meat packing
workers at the Illinois plant and hence subsidize the social
reproduction of people and place in this small Midwest town.

377
Hence, the development of both the immigrants home communities in their land of origin and that of the Illinois town
where they work are based on immigration. Ultimately, she
advances the thesis that global restructuring of social reproduction has increasingly deterritorialized and reterritorialized the processes of local economic development.
What are the ethics of contemporary planning that distinguish its praxis from the previous eras of transnational planning? Roy introduces the idea of critical transnationalism as
a critique and practice and then grapples with this complex
issue. She posits a critical transnationalism revealing the
structural power difference that the universal narrative of
globalization, discussed earlier in this introduction, obscures.
In addition, critical transnationalism is instructive to planning as a practice since she argues this is a value oriented
profession defined by ethics, one that is concerned or ought
to be concerned with the public interest (p. 412). Drawing
inspiration from the work of Chicana/Chicano visual and
performing artists and scholars who create a nexus between
art and social change (p. 410), she imagines a planning
praxis that negotiate[s] the divide between social responsibility and technocratic professionalism (p. 410). Critical
transnationalism posits planning ethics that foster new
imagination of cities as inevitably transnational, made up of
parts of elsewhere (p. 412). Similar to how many environmental activists have mapped the ways in which highly
industrialized societies owe an ecological debt to the rest of
the world, Roy calls for a planning that is acutely aware and
able to map relationships of dependence and complicity, a
stark reminder of how our planned landscapes are dependent
on and complicit in the carbon and war economies of the
world (p. 413). This, however, requires slow learning, to
defeat the urge in policy circles for ready-made, off-the-shelf
products that have reduced planning to a transnational trade
in models (p. 410). Slow learning, Roy argues, requires
planners and policy makers to learn by closely engaging the
context and requires an ethnographic patience that interrupts the frantic traffic of labor, capital, ideas, and symbols
through which late capitalism operates (p. 411).
What are the contemporary mechanisms by which planning ideas and practices travel and cross national borders?
Parnreiter deals with this question by looking at the institutional arrangements and practices that produce policy
desire and strategic plans. These plans he argues are indeed
models to help produce cities hospitable to global firms.
His main concern is not the worldwide shift to strategic
plans, but how it was achievedand what happened to
strategic planning in the process of spreading (p. 417). A
large body of literature has focused on punitive processes
and conditionalities that the International Monetary Fund
and World Bank operationalize to produce policy consent
across the globethe stick. Parnreiters contribution
helps us understand the carrots involved in this process.
He points out how globalization of plans and policies

378
involves certain institutional practices that legitimize and
disseminate plans and models. Those include events such
as the World Urban Forum, which he calls a trade fair for
urban policies (p. 419) offering awards for best practices and detailed how to manuals for dissemination. It
also involves city-networks through which professionals,
mayors, and planners engage in policy tourism and window shop for readymade, off-the-shelf plans. Taking
Barcelonas Regeneration Plan and the multilateral institutions like UN Habitat as cases in point, Parnreiter moves
his analytic optic beyond an export model where the West
exports its plans to the rest, stressing the multiple points of
conception involved in production and consumption of
transnational plans.
In sum, the works in this symposium have provided ample
material for understanding the transnational movement of
people, resources, and policies. As planning educators and
scholars, we need to pay attention to these emerging trends
and conditions as they inevitably affect how we teach, plan,
and analyze. Planning is a field through which relationships
among the state, citizens, and the market are negotiated. If
these very relationships are going through profound changes
because of the mobilities we discuss in this symposium, then
surely the practice, teaching, and conceptualization of planning require a profound debate and, ultimately, transformation. The contributors to this symposium hope to have
contributed to this process.
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